Welcome to part 3 of a four part series of Spring Cleaning for the 2017 WWE Roster! For the discussion on the Raw (part 1) and SmackDown (part 2) rosters, check out those links. This time around, we’ll be focusing on the wrestlers who are still part of the NXT crew.
Essentially, this is an evaluation of the men and women that WWE either will or perhaps should be releasing to free up some space on the roster, for whatever reason. This could be anything from a prolonged stay in the company with little to no improvement, pure lack of talent to begin with, no longer having anything left to contribute, or any other qualifiers that may put someone in danger.
DISCLAIMER: Some people are getting the wrong impression about this series. None of this is based on any insider information that these releases will happen. This is entirely a thought exercise and a debate asking you who you would pick to release if you were in a situation where you had to do a “spring cleaning” adjustment for budgetary concerns. Try to keep in mind that this is not a petition to get people fired or anything malicious, but just a discussion on who in your mind might be the easiest to cut if necessary.
Angelo Dawkins (possibly)
Since I haven’t seen his new tag team with Montez Ford (aka The Street Prophets), I’m willing to admit that there might have been an upgrade behind the scenes and he’s no longer in the same position he used to be.
However, I doubt that’s the case, as the entirety of me checking out Angelo Dawkins’ career has made me think he didn’t have all that much value to him, so my anticipation is that it won’t be groundbreaking by simply pairing him up with another person.
I don’t hate the guy by any means. There isn’t even anything I find particularly bad that he does. The overall package, though, just seems like it isn’t worth the investment. Dawkins has never once made me think he had earned his contract when he was teaming with Sawyer Fulton or when he was solo, so I’m always perplexed how he sticks around when some others leave.
Sawyer Fulton
Speaking of Sawyer Fulton! He’s in the same basic boat as Angelo Dawkins. The best thing going for him was when he was paired with SAnitY, and he rather quickly suffered an injury which resulted in Killian Dain taking his spot.
That sucks for Fulton, who basically has to start back over for what feels like the fourth or fifth time in his career. He’s tried a handful of different gimmicks and none of them were inspiring, so it’s hard to imagine anything else he does in the future will really turn heads.
Granted, there’s a chance he just hasn’t reached that one character that can really take off, as even someone like The Undertaker used to have worse gimmicks beforehand, but Fulton doesn’t impress me enough in the ring or on the mic for me to be okay with so many different attempts to find what works and coming up short every time.
Buddy Murphy and Wesley Blake
Despite no longer being a tag team, I have to lump these two together, as there just isn’t enough to talk about on their own.
Seriously, what have they done since BAMF ceased to exist?! It’s so hard for me to even remember a handful of appearances that happened, let alone anything they specifically did in that time frame.
My last memory of Wesley Blake was him coming out to a slow song that sounded cool, but not at all in the way his character could have used. Just picture Roderick Strong coming out to Mankind’s original theme, or Ric Flair strutting to the ring with Dean Ambrose’s song. It doesn’t work.
His “beautiful” gimmick is unfitting both in the sense that he completely isn’t and how it isn’t played for laughs like it should be. Instead of being entertaining in either way, it just reminds me of when you see chubby girls wearing shirts that expose their belly buttons and you wonder if they think anybody truly thinks that’s enticing or if it’s a joke that nobody’s finding funny enough to giggle at.
Even worse is Buddy Murphy, who may not even have all that going for him. I honestly can’t remember if he’s shown up on NXT television at all since splitting from Blake. If I can remember more about Dan Matha than someone who was a tag team champion, that’s not a good sign for your career—and I happen to like Murphy more than Blake!
As a tag team, I didn’t quite understand putting the title on those two, but going solo was definitely the worst decision for them. Now, it seems like they have nothing going on at all except for having exceptional luck when it comes to significant others. My hat is off to you fellas, but you might have traded in your wrestling careers to the devil for Sara Lee and Alexa Bliss.
If they were considered good enough, they would have come up to the main roster by now or at least been somewhat featured in NXT in some capacity, rather than hanging out on live event tours and nothing else. By this point, WWE should just cut to the chase and nix them.
Josh Bredl / Bronson Matthews
A while back, there was even a rumor that Josh Bredl had been released, which supposedly isn’t true, but I didn’t blink an eye at it. If it’s been this long since he won his season of Tough Enough and we still haven’t even seen vignettes for him to appear on NXT, that means WWE must think he’s not ready, and after all this time, doesn’t that mean he probably never will be good enough for them to put out there?
It’s never a good sign when you have a name that isn’t too generic (a la John or Dave or whatever) and you see someone else on the roster using it. Bronson Matthews isn’t a guy that fans are aware of, yet it seems more likely that Mr. Bronson will show up on TV screens than Josh Bredl’s character—whatever that may be, as “Bronson Matthews” certianly doesn’t seem like a yeti creature to me.
It seems as though the Tough Enough curse has continued, which really calls into question how such a fundamentally simple show idea could fail spectacularly season after season. There’s thousands of people who want to be WWE superstars and somehow, every year, we’re lucky to find one person in the entire cast that actually makes a career out of WWE and it normally isn’t even the winner. Sometimes, the winner doesn’t even get a chance, like what seems to be happening with Josh here and what happened with “Silent Rage” Andy Leavine. His career amounted to being given a Stone Cold Stunner. Josh’s seems to be “the dude who lasted longer at the Performance Center than ZZ.”
Those are my picks for the NXT roster, but who do you think should be on the chopping block to be future endeavored? Tell us your ideas in the comments below!
